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Sunday, March 8, 2009

By far the biggest change to this year's game is the addition of fighting styles. This is a sort of classification of each wrestler type that gives wrestlers under each type specific abilities. For instance, powerhouse types like Batista can effectively "hulk up" when they fill up their energy meter and store a fighting style icon, which renders them impervious to strikes and makes all their grapple moves irreversible. Secondary abilities are also available. For instance, a powerhouse can also pull off stronger Irish whips that send opponents over the ropes. There are several different types of these styles, including technical wrestlers, high-flyers, brawlers, submission specialists, dirty fighters, showmen, and hardcore types.For the most part, each of the abilities assigned to these different archetypes fit nicely into each wrestler's general moveset, but some have a tendency to appear overmuch over the course of a match, and in some cases, they also feel a little overpowered. The powerhouse's ability to just grapple at will tends to be a lot more effective at ending a match quickly than the high-flyer's ability to do surprise pins. Granted, there's always been that difference in effectiveness between wrestlers of this type, but these fighting styles just make those differences all the more pronounced.

Not to suggest that you can't win with smaller, less powerful guys, but if you get caught in a flurry of punches from a brawler or a series of hard slams from a powerhouse, you're down for the count.Still, apart from this ECW-centric stuff, there's not much else to marvel at with the gameplay this year, especially considering all the holdover problems from previous games that plague this sequel. The artificial intelligence continues its downward spiral into utter boobdom, especially in any kind of gimmick match where weapons are prevalent.

They'll constantly stand around, periodically flailing at another wrestler with a weapon and hoping for the best. Any match that has a ladder involved but nothing hanging above the ring to collect still results in a number of wrestlers constantly scaling ladders in the middle of the ring over and over again.

Tag partners still sometimes forget that they're supposed to help you when you're in trouble, too. And now, with this new fighting style system, the AI has taken to relying on these various special moves to an almost irritating degree. How many times can one guy use the ref as a shield, or "hulk up" in a match? Apparently the answer is "too many."In terms of content, SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008 offers roughly the same roster of match types and modes as last year, with a few small additions and a few significant downgrades.

The biggest downgrade is the 24/7 mode, which actually now wraps the single-player story mode and the general manager mode up into one haphazard package. In an effort to combine the two, the story mode has lost all its punch and ability to deliver something even closely resembling a real storyline. Sure, you still get the yearlong title hunt with one of the main superstars in the game or a created grappler, but the story barely rears its head beyond the scope of a series of voicemails you get from other wrestlers and the general manager of the brand.

The few cutscenes you do get are pretty generic, and sometimes they don't even fit the context of what's going on. Sometimes wrestlers you supposedly are fighting with will give you a handshake backstage. Couple that with some of the voicemails sometimes identifying the wrong person as your rival, and even identifying the wrestler you're controlling as someone you're supposed to fight, and the story aspects of this mode feel more than a bit hacked togetherCLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD SETUP